Microsoft Teams Operator Connect Partners: Which is best for our company?

Which Microsoft Teams Operator Connect Partners are best for our company?

If you’re asking that question, Mike is here to help. In the video below, Mike tells you the questions you can ask about your organization, that will help you narrow the field and find the best Operator Connect partners to quote.

Want Mike’s recommendations on the best Operator Connect partners to quote for your organization? Click the button below and ask Mike today.

About Mike

Mike Smith is the Founder and President of AeroCom and has been helping companies with telecom and cloud services since 1999. He has been the recipient of numerous business telecommunications industry awards, including being recognized as one of the top 40 business people in Orange County, CA., under 40 years old. You can also hear him as the host of the popular Information Technology podcast, ITsmiths with Mike Smith. Follow Mike on YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit and SpiceWorks.

Transcript

Your company is looking into Microsoft Teams phone system. And one of the things that you’ve heard about is Operator Connect. And maybe you’ve gone into the Microsoft Teams admin portal or the Microsoft 365 admin portal, I should say, and you’ve looked at Operator Connect and you see that there’s different Operator Connect operators or providers that you can choose from. And you’re wondering, “Well, which ones do I choose? How do I make this decision?”

Well, that’s actually a great choice. Don’t choose them randomly. You’re probably going to end up with the wrong one. There are some methods to choosing the best one for your organization, and that’s actually what I do. So, there’s definitely some that are better fit than others. So I wanted to make a quick video and tell you some of the information I’ve learned over the last six months to a year on since Operator Connect came out. How do you do a good matchmaking with the Operator Connect providers and companies?

Ask me

But before I get too deep into the video, really quick, if you want a shortcut… Yeah, this video’s great. It’ll give you some good information. But, if you just want my recommendations on the best Operator Connect service providers for your organization to quote, and your organization has at least over a 100 users, don’t hesitate. Just reach out and contact me via email or by phone (714.593.0011). I’m happy to help. This is actually my job. You don’t have to figure this stuff out on your own. More information on that at the end of the video.

Also, don’t forget to hit the like button and subscribe to the channel so you don’t miss any future videos.

Geography

All right, so if you want to know the right vendors to quote for Operator Connect, which service providers should your organization use? The first thing you should think of is geography. Where are your company’s locations at geographically? Are they all in the United States? Are there some in the United States and some in other countries? If so, what countries are they in?

How many Cloud PBX or phone system users does your organization have total, and where are those different users located? Are they working from home? Are they at different locations? Are they across the globe? So knowing that information is going to help determine which Operator Connect service providers you should quote. Because, obviously some of them specialize in only the United States, where other specialize in global organizations. Some specialize in other countries. So, that is the first thing you need to take a look at.

PBX User Count

Similarly, you also need to know how many users your company has on the phone system. I mentioned earlier where those users are at knowing how many you have. But knowing how many you have total is important because some Operator Connect service providers specialize in small companies, others specialize in medium to large size companies, others specialize in global enterprise size organizations.

And I kind of categorize that as a small company with under a hundred users, over a hundred users to maybe about 5,000, I’d say is more of a medium size company to medium, large size organization, and anything over 5,000 users, I would consider more of an enterprise level organization. So if you use those three, knowing that upfront again, will help you know upfront which organizations you should be quoting.

Usage Patterns

Another thing to take a look at is usage patterns. So how is your company using the phone on a daily basis? And why that’s important is some Operator Connect service providers are going to have pricing that suits certain types of calling patterns versus others. For instance, is your company on the phone a lot? Do you have some places within your company or some departments that use the phone a ton? Like, do you have a call center within your company? Are you making a lot of outbound calls? Is your company making a lot of inbound calls? Do you have a lot of toll free calls coming in, like on an 800 number? Where are those calls originating from? Where are they terminating? Are they all calls coming from the United States and coming into the United States? Or are they coming from international locations or from international locations, are you making a lot of outbound calls to the United States?

Break it down by department

So what type of departments in your organizations are making calls? Where are they making calls to? Where they’re receiving calls from? And is there a lot of volume involved? Those are all really good things to know upfront. And you don’t have to have exact numbers, but you should have a decent feel. Vice versa, if your company just doesn’t make a lot of phone calls, that’s good to know upfront too. Like, “Hey, we don’t really use the phone heavily, but we just have a need for everyone to have at least a phone system extension. But you know, hey, we’re an engineering firm and we’re not really on the phone a whole lot.” Those are good things to know, because certain providers have different pricing plans that suit certain types of calling patterns.

Not every service provider has the same type of pricing. Some pricing suits companies that don’t make a lot of calls. And some companies have pricing that better suits companies that make a lot of calls. So know that up front.

Feature Requirements

Feature requirements is something else you want to think about, that will help you really know which Operator Connect service providers should we be quoting? And by feature requirements, I don’t mean the basics. The basics, I would say, are like, hey we need to be able to transfer calls. We need to have voicemail. We need an auto attendant. We need a hunt group where you call in and it rings. These 50 phones all at the same time. Those are all basic requirements that every single provider is going to have. What questions you want to ask are, do we need to send and receive, or would we like to send and receive text messages from our work phone numbers, from our cell phones.

Maybe employees are using their cell phones out there every day for texting, and you’d like to consolidate that down onto their work numbers so they’re not using two different phone numbers all the time. Or maybe your company needs things like, hey, you have call recording needs and you need to record calls, and you need to store those calls for a certain amount of time, or maybe you’d like individual users within your organization to actually record their own calls and have access to those calls.

Do demos first, then ask about features

What types of features does your company need? And just at least like, maybe ask around a little bit, or maybe do a couple demos first and see what kind of features are available. And from those demos, make a little list of possible features and run those by your employees to see what features are really important and must have, versus nice to have and not that really important. Knowing those will really help you narrow down the list of Operator Connect service providers that you’d like to quote. Because, some will offer those features and some will not.

Call Center

The last thing I’m going to talk about today that I mentioned a little bit earlier, that will help you differentiate Operator Connect service providers is call center. Does your company have a call center or nowadays we call them contact center requirements? So, do you have a call center? Maybe a help desk for your IT group or your HR department, or maybe you have a customer service department help desk. Any type of call center.

Do you have that today? And how deep are you taking it? Is it just calls coming in or do you want to actually integrate things like web chat into the call center, where you can manage how long it’s taking your employees to respond to web chat requests, and also text messages coming in, and maybe there’s an app involved. Maybe your company has an app and it’s using customer service and you want to integrate that into the call center. So does your company have a call center, and how deep do you want to dive into the call center? How complex are the feature requirements within the call center that will also help you determine which Operator Connect service providers that you might want to work with?

Call Center – Basic or Complex?

Sure. You can definitely separate the call center from the everyday phone system users, but wouldn’t it be nice to have it all somewhat on the same platform so you can see presence of people on the call center, who’s on the phone versus people in the company that are on the phone, and have those things talking to one another, at least a little bit. So definitely another something that you need to think about and maybe ask some questions about, and that will help you determine which Operator Connect service providers your company should be quoting.

Ask me

I hope the video was useful. If so, don’t forget to hit the like button and subscribe to the channel down below. And if you’d like my recommendations on the best Operator Connect service providers that your organization should be quoting, especially if your organization has over a hundred users, that’s really my specialty. Don’t hesitate. Just reach out and contact me either by phone (714.593.0011) or by email. I’ve been a broker for all the major telecommunication service providers for over 19 years.

So I know this industry inside and out, and based on your company’s requirements, kind of like what we talked about today, I can tell you really quick, hey, if I were you, I’d be quoting these three service providers, and I can introduce you to the right people at those companies and oversee the quoting process for you. And the nice thing is that the service providers actually pay me my broker fee. So you don’t have to pay me at all to do this service. So no excuse not to at least reach out and ask me for my opinion on this stuff. All right, well, I will catch you on the next video.